Slashback

14

Niko

Twelve Years Ago

When I woke up, I felt empty. My mind blank, my skull hollow. It was a long time before a distant and misty path woven out of confused thoughts appeared. For every step on it that I took toward consciousness, I took two back. It reminded me of the dreams where I could see my room around me, but I couldn’t move—the feeling of being stuck halfway between the dream world and the real one.

This was the same. Or that’s what I thought, but what I was seeing wasn’t my room. It wasn’t any of the rooms I’d slept in, and there were many, in my life. There was the thickness of shadows and the slow swing of one dangling lightbulb. A cloud hung around the glow—a halo around a fogbound moon. It should’ve been peaceful. I’d spent many nights outside under the stars and moon when Sophia had worked a carnival. I’d liked that part, that feeling of floating up into the sky, the feeling of serenity.

I didn’t feel serene now. I felt terrified. As one half of my mind was hypnotized by the swinging stand-in for the moon, the other half was screaming. I needed to move, I needed to go, I needed to stop him. But where and who, I didn’t know. The adrenaline spiked my heart into a rhythm so fast and desperate I could hardly breathe and I didn’t know why.

My eyes drifted from the light to the wall. Concrete blocks with the sheen of moisture. Farther down was a cracked concrete floor. More than cracked—shattered. I could feel the damp in my lungs and I could smell . . . I jerked in a hard breath and spasmed, the floor scraping the cheek that rested on it.

I’d been at home. I’d been with Cal.

No.

I’d been at home and Cal was gone.

I smelled it. One corner that was darker than the others, but even in the dark I could see where the floor fell away into a deeper darkness.

Cal was gone.

I vomited. Not much, only a trickle, but it tasted sharply of chemicals.

Homemade chloroform.

This time I moved with more purpose. There was pain in my shoulders as I tried to inch across the floor. Stopping, I drew in several ragged breaths and tried to sit up. It took me several tries and nearly ten minutes, but I made it and by the time I did, I knew where I was.

I was in a basement. Junior’s basement and through the pounding headache the stench was stronger, making the smell of vomit nothing. Death and decomposition. I could see the blurry outline of stacked bags of quicklime against another wall. It could do only so much this close to the pit dug in the corner. The haze across my vision was fading and I saw that too clearly, but not as clearly as the rot I choked on. If it smelled this tainted and wrong to me how badly had it smelled to Cal when I’d tried to tell him this maniac was a grocery store butcher?

At that moment, choking on air that reeked of dead bodies and seeing that my hands were fastened with police-issue cuffs around a metal support pole, I realized big brothers don’t get to mess up.

Not once.

Not ever.

Look what happened when you did.

“I talk to the darkness and the darkness talks to me.” Junior’s voice drifted down from the stairs leading up. He would be sitting on the top stair as I could see his knees folded and his scuffed sneakers. One of those sneakers had a single drop of crimson blood on it. Small and as big as the sun all at the same time. “But he’s not all darkness, my master. At times he’s a light that blinds. A light that’s just for me when I give him an especially good offering.” He seemed genuinely pleased about it. Like a dog who’d done his trick just right and got a pat from his master. “I know what he wants. What he likes.”

I knew what his schizoid delusion wanted too: death.

“Sometimes he watches from above, when the lightning fills the sky.”

Skylight. Attic, I thought with instant desperation.

He stood and walked halfway down. He held Cal cradled in his arms as he would an overtired, sleeping child ready for bed. If it weren’t for his small chest moving, I would’ve thought he was already dead. His head was resting against Junior’s shoulder, his hair hanging in his face, his hand fisted in the man’s shirt, because he, at some level, thought it was me. He thought I’d come to save him . . . not hear him die above me while chained in a basement.

God.

“He’s such a scrap of a thing. I’ll bet in a year he’d have shot up like anything. Guess we’ll never know about that, will we? Feisty too. Tried to stab me with a kitchen knife. Kids.” Junior smiled fondly, his eyes bright, cheerful, and so happy.

So very crazy.

“I know you’re close,” he said with an approving tone that made my flesh try to creep off my bones. “Not all brothers are, but I’ve seen you watching out for him. Getting home before dark to check on him because your mama sure doesn’t. A thief and a whore and worst. She would’ve been on my list, you know, if we weren’t neighbors? You two weren’t. You’re innocents, but you were nosy and that’s that. Looking in my windows, following me in that old biddy’s giant green car. I saw you at the hospital too. They say you shouldn’t piss where you live, but you wouldn’t leave well enough alone. Nothing I could do for you then, nothing but this.”

In all ways Junior was more than I’d thought and in the one way he was exactly what Cal had thought. “But for being innocents, for that I’ll give you a gift. When I’m done with him, I won’t clean the knife. I’ll cut you up with the same one. Your blood will mingle. It’ll be good, saving a family. Sending you on high. But first I’ll sign him. I like to sign my work.”

Cal murmured in his chloroform-induced unconsciousness. Junior smoothed his hair and I wanted to vomit again, but there was no time. No damn time for anything. “I like family. You’ll be together always now, the two of you. It’ll make me proud, the work I do, when I see that.”

He started up the rough wood stairs to the first floor. “Good.” He was whispering to himself or Cal now and I didn’t know which made me feel more sick. “It’ll be good.”

I’d fucked up. I hadn’t believed Cal unconditionally. I thought he might have made a mistake. I wanted it to be a mistake. I wanted to find proof first. I hadn’t wanted to leave an anonymous tip and ruin a man’s reputation if Cal was wrong and I hadn’t wanted, more importantly, to get the police anywhere near us.

Worst of all: I’d wanted a normal life. I’d been willing to close my eyes to anything to get that.

But Cal hadn’t been wrong, and because of me we were going to die. My little brother was going to die. Sliced up, throat cut, chopped to pieces, God knew what, and his body would be thrown down that dry well already brimming with death and covered in quicklime. My little brother who’d trusted me. There was blood seeping over handcuffs that had me trapped around the iron column in front of me. I’d already started to pull and yank at the cuffs desperately while Junior had been on the stairs and I continued to rip flesh against the metal. Blood was good. It made things slippery and once I dislocated my thumb then I could slip a cuff. I’d read that in a book. I read most everything in a book because books were easier than real life, but look where I’d ended up. Nothing is as real in life as death.

No thinking of that now. I could . . . I would stop Junior because that was the only choice I had.

This was not happening. I wouldn’t let it.

Arms secured tight, I slammed my hand with brutal force against the pole because pain was nothing when that maniac had Cal. Pain was nothing. Pain was what I deserved. I repeated the motion again and again as blood splattered. It couldn’t be that difficult to dislocate your thumb or break your hand. It couldn’t be. It . . .

That’s when I saw it.

The red eyes of a Grendel were peering in the narrow crack between cardboard taped to the glass and the bottom metal sill. Curious eyes, sweeping side to side looking for Cal. Always following, always watching.

They watched. They didn’t stop. And for once that was all right. For once it was hope and not fear that sent acid bubbling through my veins.

“I don’t know what you want with Cal,” I said hoarsely. Junior was terrifyingly intelligent in his way and I hadn’t seen it. Smart enough that I could taste some sort of bleach solution he had sprayed down the back of my throat while I was unconscious to keep me from screaming. I knew the Grendel could hear me, ragged whisper or not. Tapered predatory ears were made to hear fearful breaths and screams far away.

“I don’t know why you wanted him born and why you watch him, but that monster upstairs”—the Grendel showed an improbable stretch of metal teeth, laughing; it was laughing, at the word monster—“is going to kill him. He could be killing him right now.”

No. No.

“Whatever you want with Cal you’ll never get it now. Not if he dies”—not if he’s is slaughtered—” upstairs. Do you understand me?” I demanded desperately.

The Grendel blinked slowly but the scarlet of its eyes flared like a rising sun and it faded into the sliver of night. How pathetic was I, how much of a failure that my best hope for saving my little brother depended on siccing one monster on another? I didn’t care. I’d take any hope I could get.

I felt the nauseating pain of my thumb slam one more time against the pole and pop out of the joint. There are times pain isn’t pain; it’s relief and it’s hope and it was life. My life. Cal’s life. I folded my fingers into as narrow a wedge as I could, tore them out of the metal cuff, and I ran.

I wasn’t lithe and sleek as my martial arts teachers would’ve hoped. The one cuff still fastened to one wrist and rattling, I stumbled up the stairs, falling once with splinters ramming under my short nails and hitting my dislocated thumb. It should’ve hurt. It should’ve paralyzed me with agony, made me curl into a ball as pain exploded through me.

I didn’t feel a thing.

I slipped in my own blood dripping from my wrists as I hit the cheap kitchen linoleum and kept moving. The attic I spotted in a nerve-freezing moment. The pull-down stairs in the hallway were waiting for me and I went up them as clumsily as the basement ones, but I went fast. Speed over form. Life over death. There was dried blood on them. Long soaked into the raw wood. Cleaner wouldn’t get that out of the grain, would it? No, never. There was death on every step upward, but this wasn’t Jacob’s ladder. This trail of screams and mortality didn’t raise you up—it led to Hell. I knew it.

Cal . . . God, Cal, don’t be dead.

In the space above there was a skylight and it let in enough streetlights and faint painpricks, because they hurt—what they showed—hurt, of stars as well as a quarter moon.

I saw it all.

Cal’s shirt was neatly folded, such a neat serial killer was Junior, on a table of knives and scalpels and other things that wouldn’t leave my memory as long as I lived. My brother was there, his hands duct taped behind him and his dark head flopping loosely with chin down against his chest. He was facing the wall, slumped bonelessly in a far corner.

Limp.

Unmoving.

Rivulets of blood on the floor.

My brother.

Foulmouthed, purple handprints on the refrigerator, smart and lazy, read stacks of comic books instead of schoolbooks, who’d taken on a raging, drunk Sophia to save my money for college, who taught me the difference between shades of gray and black and white and lied to little old ladies if there were cookies in it for him. My brother who I’d seen born and who I’d let die because I didn’t believe him soon enough.

I didn’t look for Junior. I didn’t care. Kill me, don’t kill me—I did not care.

I pulled Cal up in my arms. He wasn’t Sophia’s, he wasn’t the Grendel’s, he wasn’t Junior’s. He was mine and I would keep him as long as I could.

Forever if I could. With my brain crumbling at the edges, fracturing through the middle, forever seemed . . . right.

I pushed his hair from his eyes, leaving my blood on his face. They were closed, black lashes against paper white skin. There was a sluggishly bleeding slice straight across his chest a few inches below his nipple line. The top slash of a J.

“I like to sign my work.”

No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t right. His blood should be inside him, not out. I wiped a hand frantically over the blood, trying to push it back in the wound, back inside Cal. I only ended up smearing it everywhere over Cal’s stomach and thin chest, making it worse.

How could it be worse?

The thought staggered me.

Swallowing broken glass that had nothing to do with the bleach, I thought numbly . . . wait . . . no . . . the dead don’t bleed. And they don’t breathe. Cal was doing both. I clutched him tighter, so damn small, and all there was in my world.

Junior. Where was Junior? Where was the dead man?

Someone was growling savagely. It might have been me.

There was another crumpled pile in the opposite corner of Cal. This bundle was much larger. I settled Cal against the far wall, carefully making sure the blood wasn’t as much as I’d thought. He wasn’t bleeding out. It was a slow flow, I could see now. For a moment it could wait. Cal wouldn’t mind, considering what I had planned.

I limped over and nudged clothes and muscle disguised as fat over onto his back. Junior’s eyes were half open and bloody foam framed his mouth. That would be from the vicious slashes that penetrated his clothes and several inches of flesh from the base of his neck to just above his groin. I caught the faint foul smell that had to be the spill of intestinal contents. The room had a colored tint to the air, red as the blood all around us, from the crimson moon shining through the tiny skylight made of scarlet glass.

The Grendel had listened.

It had come and gone, but it had listened. It had done what I couldn’t do.

I didn’t know what that meant, but it was worth it. Right now it was worth it.

But it hadn’t finished the job. Oh, given three minutes and Junior would be as dead as the victims in his basement, but the Grendel had left me a present.

Or it might be a reminder.

They were watching Cal. I needed to do that too and do it better.

I picked up the knife that lay across Junior’s slack palm. It had blood on it, Cal’s blood. Junior didn’t get any of that. It didn’t belong to him. I methodically wiped the blade on my pants. “I have a line, you know. It’s been moving around lately, but I have one,” I said cold and brittle as frost. “You, motherfucker, crossed it.”

I rammed the knife through flesh and bone and into his heart.

The faint uneven beat vibrated through the metal, the handle, and into my hand before finally stopping. He touched my little brother—I stopped his heart.

It was a fair trade.